The messengers catapult onto the stage in breathtaking leaps and midair somersaults. Macbeth and Banquo ride into a forest on invisible horses, circling each other with high leg kicks in striking synchronicity, martial flags rising from the shoulders of their medieval leather armor. Lady Macbeth sings a piercing aria of unbridled ambition, moving sinuously across the stage in silken robes.

Actually, it isn't Macbeth but Au-Shu and his partner Meng who ride into the forest to encounter not three witches, but a whirling, aged Mountain Spirit. And it's Lady Au-Shu who tempts, cajoles, ridicules and pushes her husband to kill the king and take the throne of blood. But there's no mistaking the source of Taiwan's Contemporary Legend Theatre's "Kingdom of Desire." Nor the significance of its impressive performance Saturday at San Jose's magnificently restored California Theatre.

Saturday marked the U.S. debut for what is reputed to be Taiwan's premiere theater company. "Kingdom" is Contemporary Legend's signature piece, a Peking opera adaptation of "Macbeth" starring founder and director Wu Hsing- Kuo and the remarkable Wei Hai-Min, which has toured widely since it opened in 1986 -- the first of the company's many Peking opera versions of Shakespearean ("The Tempest," Wu's one-man "King Lear") and ancient Greek ("Medea," "Oresteia") tragedies.

It's a major production, with an acrobatic cast of 16 clad in a broad array of sumptuous Peking opera costumes (by Lin Jing-Ru) and an 11-piece orchestra under the direction of Liao Jin-Lin, playing the traditional- sounding score by Liu Sung Huei and Ma Chin-Liang. The tour -- which moves to UC Davis for one performance Thursday and then to South Carolina's Spoleto Festival -- is the ambitious undertaking of San Jose's Dimension Performing Arts.

It isn't Shakespeare, but it's pretty dynamic and often mesmerizing. "Kingdom" is "Macbeth" stripped to its most basic action and enhanced with acrobatic and musical Peking opera pageantry. Many characters and plot twists, and much bloodshed, have been cut. Playwright Lee Huei-Ming's sometimes overwrought text has little of the original's muscular vigor or psychological probing, to judge by the English supertitle translations of Lee's Chinese.

The dark, foreboding beauty is in the striking the use of color in the silks and leathers of the flowing-sleeved costumes and the piercing, smokey beams of Lin Keh-Hua's lights. The vigor is in the pulsating strings and percussion crescendoes of the music and in the performances -- not just the remarkable acrobatics of Tai Li-Wu and Hsu Hsiao-Tsun as the messengers, or the vividly predatory Peng Chun-Kang as the Assassin, but in the remarkable concentration of Wu, Wei and Ma Pao-Shan (as Meng, the Banquo equivalent), among others.

Oddly, given how well it fits the adaptation's theme of temporal transience, Lee hasn't given Au-Shu an equivalent of Macbeth's "Tomorrow and tomorrow" ("Life's but a walking shadow") speech after Lady Au-Shu's death. Her ploys of trying to cover for Au-Shu, when he sees the ghost at the banquet, are cunningly written and played. The scene in which she persuades her stoutly resistant, morally troubled spouse to kill the king is superb, with Wei cagily playing on his fears as well as his ambition and pride.

Wu brings "Kingdom" to a dramatic close, with Au-Shu self-destructing as he tries to rally his troops. His death scene, punctuated with a stunningly deployed acrobatic stunt, is melodramatic but riveting. It's an impressive local premiere. With any luck, this won't be the last we'll get to see of Contemporary Legend.